“Focus, Norton!”

We’re calling it The Wedding Play, even though it’s a musical. I went out of town to finish the first rough draft. I locked myself in a cabin in the snowy mountains, and in-between taking Al The Dog out to bark at snowflakes, I wrote and wrote. Wow, did that ever feel good. Like letting out a held-in sneeze.

Now I’m heading into rewrites, but there won’t be any cabin this time. This will require focus. I look in the mirror and say, “Focus, Norton!” I actually do this. Whenever ago, I would regain focus by going on a hike. Nothing like some strenuous locomotion to restore perspective. But, who has time for that. So, now, I bring focus about with some compassionate self-bullying. It works, in a pinch.

Yeah, focus. So, when I tell people I’m writing this play in which to get married, I get looks. I don’t know. I’ve been Googling marriage and weddings for a while now and all I get are novelty ceremonies involving Elvis, Harley Davidsons, goth gear and even mimes, or… SHOPPING. Shopping accounts for about 95% of all wedding sites. How do these things make you more married? And everyone knows I’d rather eat salted socks than shop. Nothing wrong with shopping, I just suck at it.

Chris and I were going to write the wedding play before we ever even thought of morphing our wedding into a fundraiser. Stories are the only way we understand anything. Sometimes information can lead to understanding, but the big epiphanies tend to drop down as the result of a well-told story. So, what better way to enter into marriage consciously, than through a story.

And that’s what’s happening. Through writing our story, I’m understanding who we are together, the important role that our community plays in our relationship, what we have to bring to a marriage and most importantly, what marriage is (that’s another blog entry. Actually that’s another 14 blog entries). In order to get this play written, Chris and I have had to knock our brains against each other, open our hearts and humble ourselves. Already, even before it’s completely written, the process of finding our story has taught us so much. And that’s what relationships are for, right? Am I right about this? Relationships are continuation school for life. If you’re interested in knowledge, that’s the place to look. And looking at your relationship through the lens of story, takes it all to another level. Because what does a lens do? It focuses stuff.

“Focus, Norton!”

I worried most about whether it would be interesting to anyone but us. What if we get up there in front of everybody and our story isn’t even entertaining, and everybody is just wondering if the cake will be chocolate with raspberry or white with lemon (There will be every kind of cake you can think of, actually.). Fortunately for all of you, I’m in a relationship with Chris, who is such a rambunctious and complicated creature that any story in which he appears, will be entertaining. It turns out there aren’t enough pages… I mean, there’s the broken neck (then the hand, foot, and all those ribs – and that’s just since he met me), near-death back-country hikes, the Christmas fetish combined with the love of heavy metal music, the bats, the basic fervor and conviction with which he approaches the smallest moment in life, the… Well, the Mongol hordes. I couldn’t fit in the charging bear or the garden of anger and spite. I could write a play a week. I could write a television series and every week would be a cliff-hanger. When Chris is in the story, it’ll keep your attention.

A final script is imminent, and then there will be rehearsals, which will be chronicled here, of course. Daily, we create our stories, and through our stories, we find meaning. When I cross the threshold into marriage, I want to know what it means, and I want to mean it when I say, “I do.”

~deb

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